


Lessons of the Lake

by sophinisba



Category: Merlin (BBC)
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, Episode Related, F/F, Femslash, Minor Character(s), Rare Pairing, Season/Series 02, Watersports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-18
Updated: 2010-08-18
Packaged: 2017-10-11 03:50:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/108029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophinisba/pseuds/sophinisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first thing Sophia taught Freya was that she didn't have to come up for air.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lessons of the Lake

**Author's Note:**

> For the "watersports" square on my kink-bingo card. Refers to canon violence but mostly a happy fic.

The first thing Sophia taught Freya was that she didn't have to come up for air, not if she didn't want to. Ironically, they had to stay above the surface in order to have this conversation. They'd only just met, and Sophia had gone under and disappeared for half an hour, leaving Freya to think she'd lost the only person who could help her, yet again.

Freya was treading water and crying when Sophia finally popped up again. "What were you doing?"

"Uh, swimming?"

"You didn't say where you – but how could you –"

"I figured you would follow me." Sophia frowned as she noticed Freya's tears. "Sweetie," she said, trying awkwardly for a hug while Freya continued her panicked movements in the water. "Calm down, Freya, I'm sorry! I haven't been around humans in so long, I'm not used to having to explain everything in words."

"What are you talking about?"

"You're new here, but this is your home now. You understand that, right?"

"I suppose so." All of this was new, and Freya didn't understand much of anything yet, but at least she had Sophia to help her.

"Well, part of having the lake as your home means you never have to leave it. You don't just live by the lake, you live _in_ it."

"So…"

"So, you can stay in the water all the time and your skin won't turn wrinkly. "

"Are you saying I've got gills like a fish? I think I would have noticed that."

"No dear," Sophia said tenderly, "I'm saying you died, and that means you don't have to worry about drowning anymore."

Freya stared at Sophia for a moment, and then found she needed not to look at her for a while, so she turned around and swam away. She went to a little island of smooth rocks near the shore and climbed out so she could sit still, tired after all that treading water. She couldn't help noticing the firm, unshrivelled skin of her fingers and toes. Sophia was right – her body was treating being in the water as normal.

This was going to take some getting used to.

* * *

Freya slept on the rocks that night, staring up at the stars for the first time since before she was cursed. She didn't feel any of the old pull of the dark, nothing stretching or clawing under her skin. Just the gentle light of the moon and stars, and the quiet lapping of the lake.

In the morning she dove into deep water and found Sophia was right – she felt strange, so far from the light, but she didn't miss the oxygen.

A few hours later Sophia found her, there underneath the water, and took her hand, and they swam together in silence.

There were no other people in the lake, or even at the lake, by the lake. And Freya and Sophia had a lot in common, apart from their personalities. Or at least Freya thought they did, though Sophia didn't talk much about her past. In fact, neither of them talked much because they spent so much time underwater. Or, possibly, they spent so much time underwater because they got along better when they didn't talk.

When they were together, they tended to be close. Touching close, even. They also tended to be naked – Freya held on to the Lady Morgana's dress, in case she might need it again someday, but most of the time it just got in her way. And somehow it wasn't a big change, from holding hands to touching everywhere else, and looking back on it later Freya couldn't pin down when they'd first kissed or when they'd started getting each other off. Bodies and time tended to flow together here.

That said, it was a change for Freya, who'd never had sex with a woman before, let alone underwater. She had a lot to learn. Luckily Sophia was a know-it-all and wasn't at all shy. Sophia tended to give commands, actions that Freya could understand without words (once she got used to keeping her eyes open in the murky water). _Watch this, do this, repeat after me._

Freya did, and it always felt good. It was easy and it passed the time, and they had plenty of time.

They had plenty of time to spend apart too. Time for thinking about the past, time for wondering what Merlin was up to, time for getting to know the fish and the birds and the bugs. Freya spent most afternoons and all her nights on her own. Sophia seemed to prefer to sleep on the sandy floor near the centre of the lake – she said it was more relaxing down in the cool dark. Freya eventually got used to spending most of her time underwater, but she still couldn't stand to fall asleep underwater. At first she would go back to her rocky island, but later she found it was more comfortable just to lie on her back and float, enjoying the peaceful night air she'd been denied for so long. Sometimes she'd wake to see fairy lights darting through the air, hear arguments in a quiet language she couldn't dream of understanding. But mostly they blended in with the flicker of the stars and the buzz of the dragonflies. Freya smiled and slept.

* * *

They were fooling around in the water, deep enough that it was quite cold and fairly dark even in the middle of the day, and Freya had to put her hands right in front of Sophia's face to sign, _I can't see._

Sophia shrugged that it didn't matter and Freya, annoyed (and unable to huff without breath), considered leaving but then reminded herself that Sophia almost always had good things to teach her.

_Feel this_, Sophia signalled now, and wrapped her arms around her, so they pressed against each other. Freya waited for some kind of intimate touch, but all she felt instead was the water suddenly gone warm around her legs.

The sensation was familiar enough. She'd grown up on a lake, after all, had learned to swim around the time she learned to walk. She used to pee in the water all the time when she was a little girl. It always felt so natural and easy and clean – no need to walk out to the outhouse or to wipe herself afterwards. Then one day she was swimming with her mother, who noticed the warmth in the water and asked if Freya had done it.

"You mustn't do that in the lake," her mother said, "especially not around other people."

"Why not?" Freya asked.

"It's not healthy. You need to keep it to yourself."

"The fishes do it, and we swim with them. Why should it matter?"

"Because we're different from animals."

Freya grew up and she learned not to pee or poop or fart or belch where anyone could see or hear or smell her. She learned – also mostly from her mother's example – to avoid talking about those things, to pretend they never even happened to her. She stopped peeing in the lake at all, even when she was by herself, and of course as she got older she spent less time swimming, and then she had to leave her home.

And then she died, and things had changed again. She swam and slept naked now. She regularly had sex with a girl she didn't really like. She relieved herself in the lake, of course, because she lived her whole life in the lake. _But not when anyone else was around._ Really, Sophia had a lot of nerve.

Freya glared (reminding herself of her mother) and, because she hadn't taken the trouble to learn the sign for "pee" and she wasn't going to try to act it out, she just pointed at Sophia: _You?_

_Yes._ Sophia pointed at herself, closed her eyes and displayed a look of contentment. The she opened them and pointed at Freya, a command: _You. Do this._

Freya shook her head angrily and pointed up before starting to swim toward the surface. She didn't look behind her to see whether Sophia as following. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to talk to her right away or not.

But Sophia came up to the surface at the same time she did. "What's the problem?" she asked.

Freya was still blinking in the sudden sunlight, still trying to recover her composure. "I don't do stuff like that," she said.

"Of course you do – you're a human, aren't you?"

"I don't –"

"I know, I know, you mean with other people, but I think you ought to say _didn't_, not _don't_. You do a lot of things now that you didn't do before, this is just one more new thing to try."

"But why would I want to do that? Why would you, why would anyone?" said Freya, genuinely baffled.

"Because it feels good, and because we can?"

Freya just grunted, which came out as a sort of growl, as sometimes happened, and of course just amused Sophia further. Sophia with her condescending smile and a touch on Freya's arm said, "Everything's different now. There's nothing to be afraid of. Really nothing."

Freya couldn't make sense of that statement. Her life has been nothing but fear for a very long time.

"We can't die," said Sophia.

"We could be captured."

"When we can swim to the bottom of the lake and don't need to come up for air?"

"They could –"

"But they _won't_. Nobody knows we're here, not even your Merlin." Freya frowned – she didn't like Sophia talking about Merlin. But Sophia was off in her own world, her eyes lit up as she went on, "There's nobody looking for us, no expectations to live up to. No angry fathers, no locked gates… We just get to stay here, and do what we want. Nothing to be afraid of, and nothing to be ashamed of either."

"That's easy for you to say," Freya snapped. She'd never seen Sophia look ashamed or embarrassed about anything.

"It's easy for both of us."

"How can you say that, Sophia? Do you know the most ashamed I've ever been in my life?"

"In your old life, you mean?"

"Yes. My old life, which is the life that made me who I am, so it matters, all right? In my old life there was a bounty hunter captured me and locked me in a cage. He had it on the back of a wagon, with only the bars between me and the rest of the world. So when he brought me into Camelot everyone could see. They didn't know me but they knew I must be a monster. And he didn't even give me a…"

"You don't have to tell me this," said Sophia, her voice softening. "It's over, you're all right now."

"I'd been locked up before," said Freya. "In my village after they first found out about me. At least they had the decency to lock me up in the dark," let her hide, the way Merlin did, later, underneath the castle. "And they gave me a bucket to piss in. But in this cage there was nothing, just everybody on the outside staring at me, and they said I was a filthy animal."

"But you weren't, Freya. It was them. Camelot under Uther Pendragon –"

"Shut up, Sophia, yes I was! For heaven's sake, listen to me, would you? You're worse than Merlin – you're trying to comfort me but you don't know anything about me. I _was_ a monster."

And then she told her, told her everything that had happened, going back to the first boy who ever told her she was pretty. She told her about the screams of the men and women she'd killed, about the tearing under her skin when she'd stretched into the bastid, and the ache in her bones every morning when she'd shrunk back into her frail woman's body. She told Sophia why she couldn't tell Merlin the truth, because he was already crying when he kissed her, and she didn't want to disappoint him any more with what she really was.

"But you're not disappointed, are you?"

Sophia shook her head. She hadn't interrupted in the whole time since Freya'd told her to shut up, and all she said now was, "No, Freya. Never." Then she hugged her, and Freya let her. And it wasn't like the first day, when she'd had trouble grabbing around Freya's flailing limbs. Freya was exhausted now and calm, and she knew she wouldn't sink, or even if she did she would be all right.

It didn't matter that she still didn't know Sophia's story, or how Sophia knew Merlin and Morgana, or why the fairies argued so much at night. Maybe Sophia would tell her someday, or maybe she'd just listen to her, and hold her, and take her under the surface, and that would be enough.

"Thank you," Sophia said after a long time.

"Thank – for what?" Freya said, embarrassed. "I just spilled my pathetic life all over you."

Sophia laughed and nodded. "That's one of the things we get to do now," she said. "This life we've got, this new one? We get to share it. Everything in it."

Freya thought about this, and about all the dirty lake water she'd swallowed as a child and again since she'd come here, and all the tears and piss and come she'd spilled back in the lake.

"Okay," she said. "Um, yeah, that's… If you want to try that…that thing you were doing before…"

"Hmm?"

"And other…_things_ you might want to show me, that's all right, we can try new things. Just give me a little warning first. I do better if you explain things with words."

"Hmm. All right, I can try to remember that. I still think it's a bother, having to come up here all the time."

"Hm, yeah, maybe that's an inconvenience you can put up with if you want to share this life with me," said Freya.

Then Sophia's smile went wide and eager like Freya had never seen it before. It didn't mean, _You're a sweet girl_ and it didn't mean _I'm trying not to hurt your feelings_ or _Yes, I know I'm beautiful_ or even, _Damn, that felt good_. This time Sophia was smiling in admiration and anticipation, and she didn't need to open her mouth for Freya to understand.

Freya grabbed Sophia's hand and dragged her down deep.


End file.
